Over the years, many friends of mine have destroyed their engines in grand fashion. From broken crankshafts, to internals parts becoming external shrapnel, we’ve witnessed it all first hand. The picture above is the latest, fresh from this past weekend. Apparently his snowmobile wasn’t quite up to the challenge, and when the engine fell silent, he discovered that one of the pistons had turned 90 degrees in the cylinder. Nope, never a good thing.

Once you get past the whole “I completely horrified my engine” thing, catastrophic engine damage is really awesome to see. Here is the Nutts & Bolts Top 3 Most Awesome Ways to Destroy your Engine:

1) Blowing pistons and / or connecting rods right through the engine block.

Typically when your internal engine parts forcefully become external, they do so for good reason. You likely built the engine wrong, over revved it, or had a complete lack of lubrication. What you may not realize, is that this seemingly negative action is a really just your car’s way of telling you it wants a more powerful engine.

2) Destroying your valves in epic fashion.

Whether it is losing your timing belt at highway speeds with an interference engine, or running lean enough to turn steel into magma, it sure is fun to see. The grossest display of shared combustion chamber space that I’ve seen was a Cadillac Catera that I worked on many years ago. It had broken the heads off the valves, bounced them around the cylinders, and then pushed them right back through the exhaust ports. The inside of the engine looked as if it were trying to combust rocks instead of gasoline. It was an epic win for shared space that day. Let’s not forget burned valves though, you get an extra points when the valves burn and destroy your turbo in the same instant.